From time to time, something will happen on the Internet or in real life that I know I should write about for Man Boobz, but it’s so infuriating or depressing that I can’t bring myself to write about it. The recent bullshit on Reddit involving a young woman whose story of a sexual assault was met with angry disbelief until she provided video proof that her injuries were real is a perfect case in point.
Briefly, what happened is this:
A young woman posted about a sexual assault she’d endured a day or so earlier – a man had tried to rape her, pushing her to the ground and scraping her face on the pavement. In a separate topic she posted a picture of her injuries, most notably a giant scrape on her cheek. You can see it at right; click on the picture to see it full size.
Then another Redditor noticed that some time back, the same woman had posted a picture of herself in zombie makeup. This, he said, made him skeptical that her injuries were real — it was probably just a good makeup job.
That was all it took to send Reddit into a full internet lynch mob frenzy: obviously this woman was a liar and an attention whore and, even worse, possibly a feminist anti-rape activist! Redditors suddenly became both medical and makeup experts, and declared that the giant scrape on her face was obviously phony. (Not to me; I tried arguing with several of them to no avail.) It got ugly, very ugly, very quickly.
The woman at the heart of the storm asked if she needed to post an actual video of her cleaning the wound on her face to show that it was real; a redditor demanded that she do just that.
So she did. (Here it is.) Long story short: the scrape is real. The woman also posted a picture of the business card given to her by the police detective she’s spoken to when reporting the incident. It’s now pretty clear that there is no reason to doubt that her story is true. Even the Redditor who originally challenged her story realized that she was almost certainly telling the truth.
Here’s her post offering proof to back up her story.
At this point the lynch mob lost its steam; some people even apologized to her.
But the evidence of the ugliness remains in a host of different threads and different subforums on Reddit. I honestly don’t have the energy or the patience to sift through all of the ugliness; luckily, Jezebel has given a decent account of the whole spectacle; you can go there to get some more of the details.
You might also want to look in to the main thread where most of the ugliness occurred — though at this point many of the vile accusatory comments that got upvoted when everyone seemed to assume she was lying have been retroactively voted down. (The screenshot I posted above gives a better idea of what it looked like at the time; here’s another screenshot with some of the choicer comments.)
Naturally, Men’s Rightsers contributed to the ugliness – though most of the worst comments appeared outside of the Men’s Rights subreddit, and a surprising number of r/mr regulars refused to jump on the original “she’s a liar” bandwagon.
While many Men’s Rightsters are now apologetic, others still think she may be lying.
Here’s a good discussion of the whole thing in ShitRedditSays, and a followup.
It sounds like the political institutions which were supposed to help you after your assault failed miserably, Piggy. That failure’s not any different than when a woman files a report for rape and she is not taken seriously. In fact, the two things feed each other, because it creates an environment where people don’t take other people’s right to not be hit in the face with bottles, or sexually assaulted, or whatever, seriously.
“SC, shut up.”
Nope.
http://www.whataboutourdaughters.com/
SC, you’re writing stuff like “In a just world these Reddit assholes wouldn’t be allowed to live”. Let’s keep the death wishes down to a dull roar, shall we?
Piggy: Yeah, I have proof on my blog, actually. Look for it if you like. I have no vested interest in proving my case though. This woman did. Also, regular assault isn’t political,
What was her “vested interest”. Why do you assume any rape description is “political”.
Why should we think your automatic acceptance of anyone saying, “I don’t believe her” isn’t political?
“Tits or GTFO” means “show your breasts or don’t participate in this forum” or more accurately “we don’t treat women as human unless they objectify themselves”. “Pics or it didn’t happen” means “I don’t know you from Adam (or Eve) so whatever you’re saying carries very little weight. Show me or don’t even bring it up because it is about as meaningful as reading the same thing happening to a character in a novel.”
Haec Dixit Spatio Papa
Depends, can you make a post without accusing women of lying?
Reading comprehension, motherfucker! Can you use it!?
Projection, it’s not just for movie theaters anymore.
Oops, looks like Piggy is back on the “All women are liars” default setting. I hope your mother knows you think she’s a lying slut.
I see you already post that to your mother’s facebook. Good to know.
Dick or GTFO. Um, err, on second thought….. no thanks.
*Vomits at the thought of old, shrivelled, MRA dick lost in a sea of grey hairs.
Piggy: do you have anything to say to me beside calling me an asshole? because i’m not reading whatever else you’re writing. my eyes key in on your lame, repetitive attempts to shame me
Do you have anything to offer but apologia for asshattery?
And really, is accusing me of “shaming language” the best you’ve got (or was the misspelling intentional? If so, the correct spelling of that anatomical region is perineum. If you aren’t sure, use a dictionary; there are many online), because I’m not trying to shame you. I don’t think you are capable of that level of decency, so that’s not what I was doing.
I was calling you a name. One I felt both descriptive of your behavior, and more gently than you deserved, Your Holy Highness.
Actually what they’ve heard is disproportionate focus on false rape accusations and overblown rhetoric from anti-feminists.
I didn’t see any Tits of GTFO clause on my ISP contract. In other words, assholes don’t have to be assholes. Don’t assholes get enough excuses and free rides as it is?
The phrase you’re looking for is “Pics or it didn’t happen.” But keep piling up the assholish behavior, we’re all really impressed down here.
“This isn’t a court of law; it is the internet. This woman chose to post on the internet so kind of has to abide by Internet – tits or GTFO – rules. She didn’t have to post there, after all.”
My new internet rule:
Money or GTFO.
In order to post a comment on any blog I’m also posting comments on, you have to send a financial donation to my paypal account or you don’t exist in real life.
On the grounds of one study, people said that women on college campuses had a 1 in 4 chance of being sexually assaulted, which tends to connote rape in english.
The actual statistics are 1/6. That you MRAs continue to bleat about how 1/4 was used when that was the only extant data shows your continuing dishonesty, your utter inability to adapt to what your opponents are actually saying. You heard that feminists said something once, and you are unable to move past that as a movement. Go fuck yourself. I’ll catch up to the rest later.
SC, I deleted two of your comments and I’m putting you on moderation. Suggesting that some people “shouldn’t be allowed to live” is way over the line.
GL Piggy, if you weren’t so committed to “if the answer is yes women suck and if the answer is no women suck” logic, wouldn’t your experience with your assault make you more sympathetic to people who were assaulted and then not taken seriously by the authorities?
I mean, that was terrible for you. Wouldn’t you want it to be not terrible in future, for both men and women?
Piggy… If I was going to try to shame you I’d point out that only a moron brings his College Game to a AAA park.
Someone who was the dab hand at argument, and the Men’s Rights positions you seem to think yourself would know that the “false rape accusations are so common” isn’t going to play well here. Since you’ve been here before you certainly ought to know that.
So it would have been the smart thing to take a more nuanced tack, said something on the order of rape claims are too quickly given absolute credence by vocal feminists, and when they aren’t substantiated the full-throated roar has already done damage to the careers of those who were accused with a less than airtight case, or one that was in fact faked.
But no, you had to just keep going with the same old stuff. Tired weak, like the fifth cup of tea made with the same bag, things that might play well with an audience pre-disposed to agree with your case (like the twerps at The Spearhead or the False Rape Society).
That’s just stupid. Playing at being offended is more stupid, because anyone with some semblance of education; or able to learn from past history, would expect to be called an asshole for saying what you said in a place which is unfriendly to misogyny. My 13 year-old sister has more sense than that.
Or I might have told you that your injuries didn’t amount to assault because the guy who threw the bottle probably wasn’t trying to hit you, and even if he was you ought to have known better than to go to that party, if the sort of crowd that showed up was the kind that attracts that kind of attention.
That, my dear, is how I’d engage in shaming language.
@Captain Bathrobe
[quote]DKM: what an ugly, sad little man he is. In D&D terms, he’d be something like a Kobold (and not the nice ones like Deekan)–evil, but ultimately more of an annoyance than anything else.[/quote]
Apt metaphor. An annoyance individually, but when you get a bunch of them together in one place they start to get dangerous.
Quote fail, but whatever, you know what I was trying to do.
Rabbit. the tools to make a blockquote here are angle brackets, and blockquote.
I.E. <blockquote> to begin one, and </blockquote> to close it.
They are finicky, and sometimes refuse to stop, leading to painful nesting problems, but that’s up to the HTML gods.
G.L. Piggy, you have girlfriend; If she was raped, would you accept that she was called a liar by everybody she wear makeup ?
piggy said
“But I’ll say that this doesn’t make those guys on Reddit assholes; they’ve heard all too many false accusations and overblown rhetoric coming from feminists.”
Hearsay. I have yet to receive any evidence for talk of the millions and billions of poor men locked away due to false rape accusations. There may be a small few, and they deserve justice. But hearsay isn’t the truth, and you can’t justify the opinion you seem to have that all women are apathetic liars just because your girlfriend, or ex-girlfriend was a douchebag to you when you got the shit kicked out of you.
It’s not the menfolk who are getting the short end of the stick in society. Real victims get my support, male or female. These poor men on reddit have no excuse.
Oh, that 1/6 is lifetime, btw. Not in college. If only it were ‘just’ college students.
Isn’t manboobz a hotpot for abuse denial? At least on Reddit the crowd was divided, here abuse denial is practiced almost uniformly.
Here http://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm deny, deny deny!
Look! Men raped by women http://feck-blog.blogspot.com/2011/05/predictors-of-sexual-coercion-against.html get out the sweeping brush!
“What about teh menz” is an internet meme for a reason Catalogue. In fact that men suffer was picked up by one of the posters here and she actually created a blog to talk about men’s issues.
So stop thinking you are ooooh soooo clever and bright for bringing up something that we have addressed ad nauseum. Cuz you are not.
I don’t think I’m “so clever”, the dogmatic abuse denial here is well documented, I’m just stating the obvious.